Speaking of character

Bottom line: Kelly should have apologized to Representative Frederika Wilson the minute the video surfaced. He should have admitted that he badly misrepresented what she said and did at that FBI event, and did it in a damaging harmful way. He claimed she did bad, shocking things that she didn’t do, and he claimed that he and many others there were stunned, stunned by those things – those things that she didn’t do. He’s the White House chief of staff, he said those things about a Congressional representative (and by the way a black woman, and his boss has quite a record of publicly trashing black women), he said those things that are harmful to her reputation, and they were false. He should have copped to it immediately and apologized energetically.

He has not done that.

So now what he said about her becomes a bunch of lies. He may well have thought they were true when he said them, but he knows they’re not true now – and he’s not admitting it and not apologizing. Conduct unbecoming, if you ask me.

In fact conduct cowardly and weaselly and self-serving.

Also – he may have thought they were true when he said them, but then we have to ask where did they come from. Why did his imagination conjure up such an ugly fiction about Frederika Wilson? We have to wonder.

As was quickly reported, the video of Wilson’s nine-minute speech is online. Wilson did tell a story about how she; John Boehner, the House Speaker at the time; and Obama worked together to make sure that the building was named after the two slain F.B.I. agents in time for the event. She said nothing about securing funding (she was, in fact, not in Congress when the money was authorized) and nothing about “how she took care of her constituents.” She asked law-enforcement officials present to stand up “so we can applaud you and what you do,” adding, “we’re proud of you, we’re proud of your courage.” She then told the tragic story of the two agents who lost their lives. The speech bears no resemblance to the speech Kelly described. The White House chief of staff maligned a congresswoman, whose only crime seemed to be criticizing Trump, with a series of lies.

When a reporter at the White House on Friday asked Sarah Huckabee Sanders about the glaring discrepancy between Kelly’s account and the actual speech, she said that the White House stood by his remarks. “There was a lot of grandstanding,” she said. “He was stunned that she had taken that opportunity to make it about herself.” The reporter pressed: “He was wrong yesterday in talking about getting the money. The money was secured before she came into Congress.”

He was wrong that she didn’t mention the agents who were killed; wrong that she bragged about it; wrong that she took the credit; entirely wrong about the emphasis of what she said.

Sanders shot back with the kind of statement that would be normal in an authoritarian country, suggesting that Kelly’s previous military service placed him beyond criticism. “If you want to go after General Kelly, that’s up to you,” she said. “But I think that that—if you want to get into a debate with a four-star Marine general, I think that that’s something highly inappropriate.”

No, it is not. Kelly is the chief of staff and a political operative. He held a press conference and told a lie that smeared one of Trump’s political opponents. No government official’s military background, no matter how honorable, makes him immune to criticism, especially given the subject at hand. Sanders’s response was unnerving. But the bigger lesson of the episode is that no matter how good one’s intentions are, when you go to work for Trump, you will end up paying for it with your reputation. For Kelly, not even his four stars prevented that.

It’s morally revolting that he refuses to withdraw what he said and ap0logize.

9 Responses to “Speaking of character”

Worth remembering too: Kelly is supposed to be the chief adult keeping the Toddlermonster from nuking people in a tantrum. Whatever assurance we have that way, if any of it relies on his integrity, it’s a phantom.

“Also – he may have thought they were true when he said them, but then we have to ask where did they come from. Why did his imagination conjure up such an ugly fiction about Frederika Wilson? We have to wonder.”

I spent some time yesterday thinking on this very point, after I had read the account of what Wilson actually said. I link it to the theory I have as to why some people react to me (and people like me) the way that they do.

I think many people are very invested in a kind of relative hierarchy of merit that they project onto everyone around them. The hierarchist themselves doesn’t always have to be at the absolute top of that hierarchy. The most important thing is that people they perceive to be below themselves, had better not incontrovertibly demonstrate that – according to the hierarchist’s own criteria – they belong above the hierarchist or her/his perceived betters. If a perceived ‘inferior’ does this, especially if it is done as part of the normal course of being themselves and competently going about their business, the hierarchist feels this very really as an attack, because it threatens their accustomed sense of where they are in the hierarchy that is so important to them. Because they build their identify on being better than others, rather than appreciating what their own competencies are and developing these to become effective and competent individuals who can work well with others. And because of the strong fear and sense of threat that accompanies this discovery, confabulation occurs. They don’t remember what the ‘inferior’ actually said or did, they remember a distorted version that can account for their own reactions to relatively reasonable, normal behaviour by the ‘inferior’. Men and women both conceptualise themselves relative to others in this way, but men get to be ‘superiors’ more often, particularly if they are white, and women get to be inferiors more often, depending on their skin colour and how old they are (hint – older is more inferior). Also, bully leaders are very attractive to such people as they enforce a hierarchy which can be navigated, which saves the hierarchist from existing in a scary, scary environment in which people co-operate with each other rather than spending their days humiliating, controlling and extracting emotional labour from those around them. For this reason, bully leaders are even attractive to the hierarchist when they lack the hierarchist’s most cherished merits.

In the orbits I inhabit, people who consider themselves to be relatively exemplary either morally or intellectually (the relevant ‘merit’), seem most prone to this. In my case, making intelligent observations and solving problems is unacceptable, particularly to people half my age who are very invested in being the most intelligent person (or most intelligent woman – wouldn’t want to aim too high) in the room. Old white women should just STFU already. Why is she even here again?

Kelly seems to think of himself as some kind of paragon – of honour maybe, possibly discipline or moral rectitude. I don’t know. But who are the superiors in JK’s personal merit hierarchy? Most likely to be other white men. Is Wilson white, or a man? No. And she’s graciously taking up space in public. Making statements JK might normally claim to admire, things *he might even say himself to a listening audience, had he the opportunity*. But it’s Wilson who has it on this occasion. Scary, scary. What could her motivations possibly be for such a display? Rank self-aggrandisement, indubitably. Shocking. Stunned.

I experience this a lot, more often lately even than before (this semester seems to have brought out all the liberal “allies” who are young, male, and obnoxiously oblivious, to the point of assuming they know more what it means to be a woman than someone who has actually been a woman since before they were born).

In fact, I suspect some of the “old white women should just STFU” folks would actually prefer it if we went away permanently, as in buried six feet under where we can’t be inconvenient anymore.

Kelly’s lies are now a permanent installation in the mind of the True Believers. No refutation will ever have any effect upon them.

It would be shocking enough if this kind of militant credulity were limited to the Right. But the examples of trolling and smearing by, for example, ‘trans-activists,’ Stein voters, the anti-Israel pit, demonstrate that this is a nation-wide issue.

While I’ve been fortunate this semester to tutor an exceptionally lovely group of students, over the past decade during which I’ve been teaching the same course at what is apparently one of the world’s top medical schools, the trend I’ve noted is a small but increasing minority of students who regard me with blatant disrespect and hostility. Other female tutors of my acquaintance report the same. Mostly it’s young white men, but also increasingly young women (for some reason in my case, and perhaps purely coincidentally, all of whose parents migrated here from the subcontinent – if that is the best descriptor.) As a medical student (at a different uni), I cop it from pretty much both sexes and people of just about every non-Southeast Asian ethnicity.

I don’t think it’s just that I’m getting older (and therefore inevitably more irrelevant and ridiculous), although I don’t think that helps either. Something else is afoot, to which I’ve devoted much thought and won’t go into here.

My main concern is this: later on, these medical students are going to have many female patients my age and older, and who don’t have my level of medical and scientific literacy. I’m regarded as someone to be dismissed – how will similarly aged and older female patients be able to successfully advocate for themselves in a clinical encounter with such people?

In fact, I suspect some of the “old white women should just STFU” folks would actually prefer it if we went away permanently, as in buried six feet under where we can’t be inconvenient anymore.

I agree. Though if they had their way, they’d discover the inconvenience of listening to an old* woman while at university, is trivial compared to that of being at university in the absence of old women to do most of the intellectual and various other kinds of valuable labour.

*In this sector, men my age are still considered ‘young’ by students and staff alike.

In this sector, men my age are still considered ‘young’ by students and staff alike

I don’t know your age, but I know mine, and I can say that I have seen this in basically every sector. After all, I am approximately the same age as Brad Pitt, but he is still a sex symbol and I am…an invisible, middle aged woman that men are no longer interested in sexually, so I can be ignored. If I were in Hollywood, there would be hundreds of parts for Pitt, but only a handful for a woman the same age, and I would have to compete with every other woman the same age (and the role would probably go to Julianne Moore, since typically there seems to be room in Hollywood for one middle-aged woman. Meryl Streep now fills the role of the older woman, which apparently is another area that usually needs only one).